Prize Recipient

John C. Collins
Pennsylvania State University

Citation:

"For work in perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics, including applications to problems pivotal to the interpretation of high energy particle collisions."

Background:

John C. Collins received his B.A. in 1971 and his Ph.D. in 1975, both from the University of Cambridge in 1971. From 1975 to 1980, he was a postdoc and then an assistant professor at Princeton University. From 1980 to 1990, he was on the faculty of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Since then he has been on the faculty at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is currently a distinguished professor of physics. He has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship (1986-7), a Humboldt Research Award (2000-1), and a Mercator professorship (2005), and he is a fellow of the American Physical Society. Collins's primary research interests are to understand the consequences of QCD in high-energy collisions. In collaboration with Dave Soper and George Sterman, he formulated, proved, and extended factorization theorems that are essential to many applications of QCD. In recent years, he has shown how novel QCD phenomena appear in more complicated situations, for example in showing how polarized collisions provide important probes of the space-time structure of high-energy collisions. Currently he is writing a textbook on the Foundations of Perturbative QCD for the Cambridge University Press.